Obviously the simplicity has benefits as well as negative points: it’s simpler to use, so therefore more of the community can try their hand at map-making for an extremely popular title.  This is demonstrated by the fact that since the Puzzle Maker has been available, the number of Steam Workshop files for Portal 2 has shot up to nearly 100,000 (by comparison, Team Fortress 2 has close to 5k and Skyrim just over 7k)¹ despite being the newest edition to the Workshop repertoire.

My first test chamber for Portal 2

The negatives, I feel, come with the restrictions you face with what is available to you in the Puzzle Maker: e.g. you can’t add extra doors for staged testing.  Plus, try as I might to create things exactly as I imagine them in my head, it never seems to be quite right as not all the tools are available to you.  The solution here would be to learn how to use Hammer properly… but for a lot of fans that’s a bit too confusing to contemplate.

So, you may be wondering why my production of test chamber blueprints stopped mind-May… the answer is Diablo 3.  This hit internationally on May 15th and domestically (in the UK) May 18th.  After some very irritating cock-ups from various pre-order suppliers, I eventually got my hands on it for the UK release date.

I must say I’m sort of glad I didn’t get a copy until May 18th as Blizzard had some serious issues on the international release. Let me explore these. D3 is both single and multiplayer but you have to be online all the time, on Battle.net’s servers even to play on your own.  No, it doesn’t make sense to me either.  Couple that with the fact that their servers clearly weren’t ready – nor capable – of handling the volume of people trying to connect.  Again, just to play single player.

Error 37 screengrabs were plastered all over the internet as eager fans were raging at Blizzard.  That’s not to say I didn’t escape: I’ve had three instances since I got the game where I’ve been unable to play because the damned servers were having a tea break (or eating themselves, I dunno) with Error 35 taking out the game on May 20th for over 9 hours and Error 37 rearing its ugly head again nearer the end of the month (Error 35 = servers down for maintenance; Error 37 = servers are busy).

That’s the one major drawback of the game.  The interwebs have been awash with rumours of an “offline mode”, but whether Blizz decide to actually do it or not only time will tell.

Enough of that.  The game itself is great fun with brilliantly detailed graphics and fun attacks for all classes.  This is the first RPG of this type (the hack’n’slash) that I’ve actually finished – albeit only on normal difficulty – and am now going through it again to try and find better loot (so far unsuccessfully).  The fact that I haven’t got bored yet is praise in itself as I do have a tendency to just wander off despite all my intentions to play through as every class and on every difficulty.  Again, time will tell if I do end up admitting defeat.

Blizz have done OK with the female characters; yes, they start off fairly under-dressed but so do the male counterparts.  My one criticism is the fem-Demon Hunter’s boots… why would you wear heels (at all!) to fight the prime evil?  Seriously.  Oh, and the occasional armour vs. cleavage fail is a given.

In between my battling of evil I made a brief foray into the world of the mod.  The mod in question is Centralia: Part 1, which is the opening sequence of a game developed as a mod for Half Life 2: Episode 2.  I’ve written a more general review over here but I felt it worth a mention as a) it doesn’t involve shooting guns or killing things and b) yeah, OK, my brother is one of the devs.

The idea behind it is (I paraphrase) “to make creepy places fun”, so they’ve taken an extraordinary story from real life (Centralia, PA) and added some more spooky to the mix.  Even though it’s pretty short for now, it still managed to make me jump a couple of times.

A still from the beginning of Centralia

It is a genuinely interesting concept for a game and I’d quite like to see where it goes, but to do that I first have to persuade my bro to set up a KickStarter fund, then he has to get funded through it.  Blah, blah austerity etc.

Tropes Vs Women in Games: a cool thing for you to throw money at

As I’ve mentioned KickStarter, we here at BR had this drawn to our attention.  Tropes vs. Women in Video Games is the brainchild of Anita of Feminist Frequency who is hoping to make a series of films based on, well, tropes of women in video games.

“The series will highlight the larger reoccurring patterns and conventions used within the gaming industry rather than just focusing on the worst offenders.”

This looks promising, and who here wouldn’t want to get paid to play games and make films about it?  Exactly.

Next Month:

There will be Max Payne 3 – as the PC edition got delayed so it didn’t have to do battle with Diablo 3 – and probably (finally) some AC: Revelations as I now have a copy waiting for me.  I suspect there will be more but I haven’t thought that far ahead yet!

But! Before I go, an Assassin’s Creed note…

Just quickly, this has just popped up on the internet: promise of a female protagonist in an Assassin’s Creed title!  It will be a “companion game” to AC3, subtitled Liberation, but will only be on the PS Vita.  Borderhouse (follow the link) say:

What’s interesting and exciting is that the protagonist of the game will be a woman of color named Aveline.

Admittedly, yes, that is pretty interesting – and awesome – but being me I have to push the cynic buttons and raise two points. First, we’ve talked about this before, and I will keep banging on about it until it surfaces for definite: is this the “her” Juno mentioned at the end of Brotherhood?  This mysterious lady-assassin that Desmond has to find before he can defeat the Templars?  My guess is: no.  If it’s running concurrent to AC3 he can’t have found her yet as, surely, her story comes after his ends (after another three games).

Secondly, PS Vita?  Really?  An over-expensive handheld with few titles and not nearly as many users as Xbox 360/Ps3/PC?  That’s where you decide to premiere your first femprotag of the franchise?  You don’t think that’s a little bit sidelining?  I suspect the peeps over at Ubisoft are expecting only the die hards to buy it, which means they aren’t too bothered about offering up a viable femprotag for the mainstream just yet.

Or, maybe they’re testing the waters for the Elusive Female Assassin that will save the world.  Or, maybe Aveline is “her”. Prove me wrong, Ubisoft, please!

1. as of 9am, 31.05.12

I rolled in to work today, sleep-deprived and with a quiff resulting from three days’ worth of hair product build-up, to find that the Ubisoft Workshop had linked to my previous post about sex Assassins.

Now, I’ve told you previously that the Assassin’s Creed franchise is my opiate. As anyone who has met me can confirm, the mere brush upon the subject of the games is enough to send me into a dreadful foam. My boss’s son, a kid of only 11, paled when subjected to my enthusiastic anecdotes of dumping masses and masses of dead guards into haystacks. I’m stupid over it.

Imagine my delight, then, when I found out I’d been linked to by the Ubisoft Goddamn Workshop! Imagine the shrieking. Imagine the foaming. Imagine the looks on my poor, long-suffering co-workers’ faces as I explained the situation to them in what increasingly became a sort of hyperactive semaphore. Ubisoft Workshop!! Where most of my paypacket goes each month! Where you can, for the princely sum of five Canadian dollars, order a copy of the spin-off comic Assassin’s Creed: The Fall and have it arrive on your doorstep in an Ubisoft envelope and then die of glee.

You know, hypothetically. Er.

Anyway, I’m pretty chuffed. But I think, therefore, that’s it’s time to iron out a few kinks and go into the depth I couldn’t plumb in my first article because I had a wordcount to stick to and a point to make. Ready? Good. Let’s go.

Characters get to leap over other things. Pawns get to wear silly hats that look a bit like nipples.

I still haven’t played Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, yet. I know, I know. I’m spewing all of this from the stand-point of someone who’s mashing contentedly through Assassin’s Creed II like a boss and is wondering whether or not we’ve been treated to a better representation of women in the next one.  Reasonable, no?

My boyfriend, bless him, bought me the Extra Super Mega Ultra Holy Shit A Box Edition of AssCreed BroHo for Christmas, and in the extremely ostentatious box, you get picture cards of all the character classes! After wrenching myself down off the ceiling, I was extremely pleased to note that quite a few of the classes that you get to spew forth into the throats of Templar Scum are indeed ladies, and not all of them are courtesans. This is good. We have a nice library of stabby-bastard women to chose from, and they’re believably solid and real-looking, and I’m totally convinced that they could fuck guards and Templars up just as well as everyone else you’re given to play with.

I’ve also had fellow Screed Freaks telling me that, it’s okay!  Brotherhood is awash with gender equality and I’ll love every minute of it (what am I, some kind of gender equality bomb?) (no wait, that is EXACTLY what I am) – but the Assassins you recruit and send on missions aren’t characters in their own right, are they? These are wordless, voiceless pawns that you fling merrily into the faces of your enemies. The female characters in Screed are still looking rather few and far between.

There are a few bit-parts in the historical Animus sections in Assassin’s Creed II (I’m sorry, people who haven’t played the game; you’re just going to have to keep up) and there certainly appears to be a recurring theme of everyone shagging Ezio.  Which, I’m going to have to admit, I would (he probably likes boys too, right?) but it is really amazingly prevalent.  That said, there are a couple of female characters in Assassin’s Creed II that delighted me out of my fucking tree. I was deeply heartened to see Caterina Sforza and was even more heartened to see that her backstory’s in the database. She’s brilliant! Her story is at once completely heroic and deeply upsetting, and I’d begin a rant right now about how many strong, independent women in history and fiction have often run the risk, or faced the reality, of sexual assault at some point or other, but I think that’s an axe we all have to grind (right?).  But yes; she’s intense and I’m really glad she’s in the game with as much face time as she gets, because now a whole generation of people will know about her who may not have done previously.  Yes!

Rosa, a bit-part thief in… the Venice section, if I recall correctly, has the potential to be amazing, too – but this is undermined somewhat by the fact that the first time you meet her? you have to rescue her. I mean, come on. The only person I want to see Ezio rescuing, knight-to-the-aid-of-a-damsel-style, is Leonardo. But that’s probably just me.

The main characters that we get to see actual progression and agency from – and not just flavour – in are the ones that aren’t in the historical sections. I’m talking Lucy Stillman and the fucking brilliant Rebecca, and I was a little bit sad that Assassin’s Creed II gives us far fewer outside-the-Animus sections for us to enjoy her in! I want a spin-off game of just her, kicking people in the face (which she notably never does) and forming emotional attachments to machinery.

Assassin’s Creed II does some things wrong (it’s quite a lot like a courtesan-and-victim smorgasbord, and anyone arguing that “that’s what women were in those days!” will get an internet punch, because they weren’t and to assume otherwise is stupid) and some things right (REBECCAAAAAA, REBECCA I LOVE YOU REBECCAAAA, SHAUN AIN’T GOT NOTHING ON ME, REBECCAAAAA, etc.), and is certainly doing a whole lot better than the first game, which had Lucy and Maria, the Robert du Sable cosplayer and… well, that was that.

And then Brotherhood, apparently, does it all better again, and I am deathly excited to see how, given the mixed success of the previous games. This franchise, as I will shout until I’m blue in the face to anyone who’ll listen, is one that’s going from strength to strength and is (perhaps most importantly) the child of people who give a shit about representation and who’s playing their game – as my previous article getting picked up on shows. I just wanted to reassure you that Assassin’s Creed isn’t a franchise swamped and blinded by the Frank Miller Effect wholesale. Don’t rule it out. And especially don’t rule it out where the Brotherhood can get to you, because they will.

• The author would like to take the opportunity to inform his readers that the most guards he’s ever stuffed into a single haystack in Florence was 21, and challenges you to do better.

Today, I’m subverting my own trope and writing about a game.  I do love a good computer game.  I like ones with excellent, flawed characters, and even more excellent, bizarre plots.  I like them big and sweeping and mind-bending, ideally with some kind of stealth element and something freaky and supernatural in the mix.  So naturally, I love the Assassin’s Creed franchise.  Dear god do I love the Assassin’s Creed franchise.

“Love” is probably not the right word.  It’s not enough to convey the level of brain-melting, nose-bleed-inducing obsession I have with it.  It doesn’t illustrate the way I dissolve into a twitching heap when exposed to the soundtrack, or that I screamed at the ending of the first game and spent the next week – avoiding spoilers – sleeplessly deciphering it with the aid of the internet.  “Love” just doesn’t cover it.  My affection for it is worrying.  It feeds my soul with the purest, shimmering godlike joy from on high through a glee tube.

So please understand how hard it is for me to criticise it in any way.

The franchise is, as the title may suggest, about Assassins with a capital A: not hitmen-for-hire, but the original Hashshashin, a devoted army of politically-motivated killers locked in a battle against the Knights Templar in an exciting tangle of conspiracy theory fodder that gets increasingly bizarre as the series continues.  Most of the characters are male.  This is partially a reflection on the time period in question (mid-Crusades era Syria and the Italian Renaissance) but also because, according to trope, there is only one type of female assassin.

“What type is that?” I hear you cry, perplexed that there should be more than one type of Assassin at all.

You already know.  It’s the Sex Assassin.  The one that lures in the victim with sexual desire, and then! when they’re at their most vulnerable! murders them with stabbing.

This trope is old.  The Sex Assassin is inevitably female.  She’s the Battle Whore; a sexually desirable object of cunning, guise and stabbing, and it’s exciting because there she is!  Subverting regular heterosexual intercourse by penetrating the man she’s seduced!  With a knife. Do you see what they did there!  Surely we are all undone with the inventiveness.  Women being all deadly and effective!  But only if couched in the narrative device of being used as a sex object.  That is the only way they can be empowered, apparently.

I desperately hoped that my beloved Assassin’s Creed would break free of this trope and give us some hard-ass, female battle bastards, but it doesn’t, really.  I looked at the line-up of playable classes for the most recent massive release, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, and there’s an array of interesting traditionally male roles: you’ve got a tank hangman, a plague doctor and a priest… and then there’s the woman.  There she is, at the back.  You can tell that she’s The Woman because there’s an awful lot of cleavage going on.

One of these is not like the others.

She’s a Sex Assassin.  That’s what she is.  Because she’s a woman.  What else would she do?  She’s special!  She has breasts, unlike all the other people in the world, who are apparently all hard, breastless, cisgendered men.  Women and their breasts are magical and rare, much like unicorns.  So naturally, she’ll be a Sex Assassin because goodness me, we can’t have any of the guys doing that.  Because they don’t have breasts.  And men are not sex objects for anyone ever.  Also, that’d be gay.  And that’s terrible!

There’s also a female harlequin, available as an optional extra.  And that’s brilliant, because the harlequins are terrifying, androgynous, lithe and competent (exactly what you want from an Assassin, really) and it really is nice to see a deadly, dangerous female character that isn’t a sex worker.   But – an optional extra?!  Why am I having to look for female characters who aren’t clinging desperately to the Lady Sex Assassin trope like a koala bear to the last damn eucalyptus tree on earth?

The second game (well, of the big platform releases; there’s been numerous spin-offs and blah blah blah, massive nerd dump on the series goes here, honestly, you’re better served asking Wikipedia than me because it is massively less drooling) is no better.  Ezio, our hero, has to learn how to be stealthy and to pickpocket people.  So, he learns from a female stealth expert.  Guess what she is!  Correct!  A concubine.  Because, of course, there is no other sort of dangerous woman.  All other women in Assassin’s Creed II are either harrowed victims in a revenge cycle, or Ezio’s passive, faceless lovers.

And what’s the deal with sex workers being cast as “dangerous”, anyway?  Is it yet another embodiment of Evil Female Sexuality, wherein a woman in control of her own sexuality is deemed “savage” or “out of control”?  Or is it some kind of “trap” issue?  The normative dialogue is that Mr. Cisgendered Manly McHeterosexual takes the first step towards initiating sexual contact; our Ms. Sex Assassin twists that by being the one that does the seducing instead.  The assumption, then, is that the seducer is the dangerous one, being as that men are the ones to usually instigate sex, and I’ve dropped my monocle in horror.

However!  It’s not all bad news.   Sidestepping any spoilers, Assassin’s Creed I and II have “framing” characters away from the time-travelling stabbination who are female Assassins.  They don’t stab anyone up, but are actually totally brilliant, stealthy and clever, and frequently save the (male) protagonist.  There!  That’s the juice without any spoilers.  The modern-day framing narrative characters rock my entire world, even though they’re not as action-entrenched as Altaïr or Ezio.

Recently, one of the wonderful Ubisoft community developers I follow on Twitter linked to some beautiful Assassin’s Creed-related artwork.  “Sexy Assassin!” they said.  I exploded with joy all over the internet and clicked through, hoping, as I always do, to find hot male pin-up.

Well.  I found this.

I mean, look at it.  It’s gorgeously done.  I can’t paint even remotely that well.  Hats off to the skills there!  It’s completely brilliant!  And who doesn’t like stockings?  Nobody.  Stockings are a sure-fire winner.  And, you know, I’m a fan of knives and stockings.  So that’s good.

But do you see the point I’m making?  Women apparently can’t be Assassins unless they’re some kind of Sex Assassin.  No!  Please!  It is perfectly possible to have scary, efficient, ruthless, politically-minded, devoted, armoured Assassins who are women.  Please give your female gamers someone to identify with who is tough and awesome without the over-riding message that the only way for them to be so is to give themselves sexually to men.

And, you know, I know this has been said before but – what’s with the lack of male pin-ups?  Why can’t we have male Sex Assassins?  What’s going on there?  Ezio is certainly meant to be sexy, and there’s lots of handsome portraiture of both him and the lovely Altaïr from the first game in the fanart-producing sector of the fandom.  But nothing quite like the “Sexy Assassin” I’ve linked to above.  Where’s all the ludicrous cheese and posturing?  I love cheese and posturing.  Ezio is one of the cheesiest posturers of any videogame character I have ever seen.  So where’s the pictures of him in just the hood draped all over Florence like it’s a city-sized chaise longue?

So, Ubisoft, if you’re reading, I gift to you the following three illustrations:

NUMBER ONE: the battle-worn avenger who kills for her beliefs and her Hashshashin family.

NUMBER TWO: the wise, old Master who is not to be under-estimated despite her years.

NUMBER THREE: Altaïr (artist’s impression thereof) in stockings doing a cheesecake.

NOTE TO READERS: I really do love Assassin’s Creed more than anything; please don’t let this article lead you to believe otherwise.

OTHER NOTE TO READERS: Anyone who suggests that I wrote this article as an excuse to draw Altaïr in lingerie is a heretic and liar and probably a Templar.  The Brotherhood are watching you.

Image credits for the Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood box art lie firmly in the hands of Ubisoft.

• Postscript: So then Ubisoft actually read this post, and Markgraf wrote a follow-up. You can read that here.